I Love the Smell of Vinyl in the Morning

Vinyl Record Day commemorates Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph on August 12, 1877. In 2007 and 2008, I coordinated blogswarms in honor of the day—enlisting a number of like-minded bloggers to write about some aspect of their vinyl experience, all on the same day. Before the 2007 observance, I contacted a foundation dedicated to the celebration and preservation of vinyl through its website, telling them what I planned to do. I never heard anything in response, but I linked to their website on my final rundown post.

In the runup to 2008, I got an angry e-mail from a guy who claimed to be the creator of the foundation, accusing me of stealing his group’s event. I wrote back saying that I intended no such thing—that I shared his group’s goals and wanted to further them any way I could. This seemed to placate him a little, so I asked if he’d consent to an e-mail interview about his foundation to be published on Vinyl Record Day. He said he would—but my future e-mails went unanswered, and the blogswarm went on without him.

Come 2009, I decided it was up to the foundation to promote its own event, and I didn’t organize a blogswarm. But they didn’t do anything—and they haven’t done anything. The foundation’s website doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2009. And since then, Record Store Day, an event with similar goals, has become vastly more important than Vinyl Record Day.

You snooze, you lose.

My contribution to the 2008 swarm is on the flipside, along with links that will take you to the other posts from the swarms in both years. Most of the posts should still be live, although any posted tracks have likely expired.

On this Vinyl Record Day, it’s worth noting that the earliest records weren’t made of vinyl at all. Neither were they flat discs. They were wax cylinders, an improvement over Edison’s original tinfoil recordings of 1877, which could only be played back once. The first commercially available cylinder recordings wouldn’t appear until 1889. They were sold exclusively to “phonograph parlors,” which first appeared in San Francisco and spread across the country in the 1890s. You’d pay a nickel to sit at a desk and choose a recording by speaking into a tube, then you’d listen through a separate tube as an operator in another room played it for you.

At first, each record had to be custom-made, one at a time. In other words, to make five copies of a song required a performer to sing it five different times, although strong-voiced singers could sometimes make decent recordings on multiple machines at once. In 1890, Edison’s North American Phonograph Company hit upon an innovation, playing a single master recording into a series of tubes connected to other phonographs that would make copies of the master. Refinements to the system soon made it possible for record companies to make 150 copies at a time. Still, masters deteriorated quickly, and it was often necessary for performers to sing a song hundreds of times to meet the demand for copies.

In the fall of 1890, Columbia became the first record company to issue a catalog of recordings; it’s at that point the “record industry” can be said to have begun. Phonogram, the first publication devoted to the industry, debuted in January 1891. In 1892, North American began marketing cylinder players for home use. Like all new technologies since, early adopters had to pay high prices—$150, equivalent to over $3,000 today—and the manufacturer struggled to keep up with demand. And like all new technologies since, the price swiftly fell. In 1894, Columbia began selling a $40 home player. By the end of the decade, Edison would introduce a player priced at half that. Phonographs became a necessary accessory in most middle-class homes.

In the middle of all this, an incompatible competing medium entered the field. Emile Berliner, inventor of the microphone, began marketing the gramophone to home users. Instead of cylinders, his invention used flat, wax-coated zinc discs, like the LPs, 45s, and 78s familiar to us now. The first gramophone discs had music on only one side. In 1908, Columbia began advertising double-sided recordings, and buyers preferred getting two songs for the price of one. With that, the cylinder’s popularity began to decline, even as Edison introduced a new generation of “unbreakable” cylinders. (These Blue Amberol cylinders are commonly found in antique stores today.) Columbia stopped producing cylinders in 1912; Edison kept producing them into the 1920s, as they remained popular in rural areas that didn’t have easy access to new technology.

So by 1912, the disc-versus-cylinder battle was over. The next major transition was only a few years away. From Edison’s day, recordings had been made acoustically—performers sang or played directly into a recording horn and the captured sound caused a needle to vibrate, cutting grooves into a recording medium. Electric recording was developed in the 1920s, employing microphones, amplifiers, and an electromagnetic cutting stylus. The switch from acoustic to electric recording marks the end of what is known as the Pioneer Era of Recording. Although there would be refinements along the way, the basic principles of electric recording would remain unchanged until the digital era.

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All text copyright 2004-2015 by James A. Bartlett--not that this little notice is going to stop anybody from stealing stuff if they want to.

Opinions here are mine alone, and not those of anyone else, particularly my radio employer, Mid-West Family Broadcasting, my various freelance writing clients (gasbag for hire, America), my mom, or of any other entity, animal, vegetable, or mineral, either living or dead. Which is a line I think I stole from Larry Lujack.

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